Future Shock
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt created a stir last year when he listed four companies at the forefront of consumer technology development: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and, of course, Google.
The flap focused on the company that Schmidt pointedly did not include: Microsoft.
Another interesting angle, overlooked at the time, is that none of those companies existed 40 years ago. Three of them didn’t exist 20 years ago. One of them didn’t exist 10 years ago.
At age 35, soon to be 36, Apple is the veritable grandfather of the bunch. (Microsoft is a year older.) Amazon got its start in 1994, Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004.
And yet all four—five, if you don’t want to hurt Microsoft’s feelings—are businesses with annual revenues measured in the billions of dollars. More significantly, they are watched, analyzed and dissected the way Kremlinologists used to parse every utterance of the Soviet hierarchy, all to get a sense of what they might be springing on a grateful, or wary, public.
This being the 50th anniversary of the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, much of the year will be spent studying what was promised at the World’s Fair in the way of whiz-bang science and technology—and how much of it was actually delivered.
Just as fascinating is looking at the companies that offered those promises, and how many of them made it to 2012.
Some of the exhibitors’ names would be familiar to us. IBM, for years synonymous with computers, was there with a display showing how those devices someday could be used “as a library for vast quantities of information,” according to the official guide. Prescient, except that this technology wasn’t envisioned for the home, and in 2012 IBM no longer is the first name people think of when it comes to computers.
Another Century 21 exhibitor once considered a leader in American technology is gone for good: the Bell System. We’re finally getting the videophones that science-museum exhibits have promised for decades, but we’re getting them from Skype (now a Microsoft subsidiary) and the like. The Bell System, meanwhile, has been split apart, recombined and split up again so many times and in so many ways that the chart tracing its corporate history produces a web that would dizzy a spider.
RCA was an exhibitor in the building known today as KeyArena, offering views of TV sets of the future—I wonder if they anticipated the flat screen—and its own research efforts in communications satellites. You can still buy products with the RCA name slapped on them, but the original company was broken up years ago.
It’s tempting to write off such rapid churn and turnover in the corporate ranks as a phenomenon limited to an industry like technology, where change is the normal condition. But that view would be misleading. Consider retailing. In 1962, the leading names would have been Sears, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth, A&P and Kresge. A few of those survive today in shrunken or weakened form. Some are gone entirely. That year, Kresge opened the first store in a chain that was to reshape the face of retailing—Kmart—which, in turn, was eclipsed by a company that no one outside Arkansas knew of when it opened its first store in 1962. That would be Walmart, now the world’s dominant retailer.
This is a lot of change for an industry in which radical restructuring unfolds over years, even decades. In the tech world, conversely, business life cycles are much more compressed, and change that unfolds over months is sometimes regarded as pokey.
If you were suddenly transported to the 100th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, you’d find that a lot of promises about the future were fulfilled. You might recognize the names of the companies that made those promises reality, or you might discover that the familiar and flashy names of 2012 were long ago succeeded by multiple generations of newer, flashier tech stars.
As they say, sic transit gloria mundi—and especially gloria technologi.
Bill Virgin is founder and editor of Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.
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